Constance of Castile: Uncertain Princess

Constance of Castile*1354-1394 

Constance, or Constança, of Castile was the second wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, himself the son of England’s King Edward III.  Known to students of history primarily as the wronged wife of a man whose passions lay elsewhere, to readers of Anya Seton's novel Katherine as a small, dark, near fanatical woman with questionable personal hygiene and, finally, to today's new women's historians as a powerful woman who charted her own destiny, we are left to wonder who, exactly, Constance really was.

Constance was the daughter of Pedro I (the Cruel or Just, but for various reasons I'll be sticking with Cruel), King of Castile after the death of his father Alfonso XI of Castile (by his wife Maria of Portugal).  Such a noble heritage really should have made Constance an unchallenged and valuable Iberian princess, heiress to Pedro's throne as the first-born and eldest surviving of Pedro's many children, but for one minor detail: her father was married to someone other than her mother at the time.  In fact, it is dubious he was ever legally married to her mother at all.

Pedro the Cruel; Convento de Santo Domingo el Real,
Madrid.

Later portrait, clearly based upon carving, shows
Pedro with a tall, erect stance, blue eyes, and a head
of blond hair.

The devil is in the details.  Pedro himself may have carried forward emotional baggage from a less than ideal childhood.  Iberian courts could be deadly compared to others in Northern Europe at the time, and the court of Alfonso was no exception.  Married to a respectable Iberian princess, Maria of Portugal, Pedro's father had a fondness for women other than his wife; in particular, Leonor Guzman, a beautiful Castilian noblewoman, with whom he had nearly a dozen half-siblings to Pedro.  

However, unlike John of Gaunt's carefully constructed familial mutual respect between his 'real' family and his johnny-come-lately legitimized Beauforts, there would be no harmony betwixt Alfonso's two families. This would ultimately cost Pedro his crown, his life, and thus reduce the value of daughters Constance and Isabel on the European marriage market (Beatriz, the eldest daughter, ultimately resigned herself into entering a convent after one too many marriage proposal deals gone south).

The affair between Alfonso and Leonor, which predated Alfonso's marriage in 1328 to the Infanta Maria, lasted to the end of Alfonso's life. One might reasonably wonder just how happy that particular union was on the face of it. The question seems well answered by actions taken by Maria herself.  By 1335, she appears to have had quite enough and, with her family's backing, left Alfonso, his philandering and his increasing isolation of her.

It was a strategic move on Maria's part:  Castile and Portugal found themselves facing a mutual foe -- Aragon -- and, with the Pope weighing in and declaring that Alfonso was to return to Maria, which he did albeit briefly, Maria was 'reinstalled' to her position.  After the defeat of Aragonese forces, however, Alfonso shrugged his shoulders, put Maria away again and returned to Leonor.

There is some indication that this familial backdrop had an impact on the development of Pedro's psyche.  Pedro grew up with philandering and uncertainty.  His half-siblings had a powerful mother to advance their cause, perhaps even over that of Pedro.  Both Maria and Leonor survived Alfonso; however, pointedly, only the son of one of them could be king.

Where Pedro might have chosen to take the high road of being king and ignored or sent away Leonor and kept his half-siblings close enough to monitor but not too close to gain support, Pedro chose the low road and had Leonor either executed or murdered.  Thus 'avenged,' Pedro allowed his mother Maria to briefly take control of Castile to advance her son's interests, including a favorable dynastic marriage to a foreign friendly powers princess.  Previously, Alfonso had chosen a foreign alliance with England: Joan, daughter of Edward III and his queen, Philippa of Hainaut, was betrothed to Pedro at age 12 in 1345 and dead of the plague, en route to Castile, in 1348.  Upon Alfonso's own death, Maria sought a second foreign marriage alliance, this time to a French princess.  Blanche of Bourbon was married by proxy at age 13 to Pedro in 1353, in person the following year in 1354, and dead by age 25, largely alone, guarded, forgotten, and quite possibly murdered.  There would be no children for reasons which follow.

Not long after Pedro's marriage to Blanche -- whom he pointedly abandoned after a whopping three days of marriage -- Pedro sired a daughter named Constance.  Her mother was Pedro's mistress, Maria de Padilla, a Castilian noblewoman.

Maria had many things going for her as an ideal handmaid to Pedro of Castile:  she was reportedly beautiful, nobly-born, loyal, and Pedro was besotted with her.  Among her many admirable qualities, however, being Pedro's legal wife was not one of them.  It was a status she was never afforded in life and her "marriage" to Pedro sworn to only reluctantly by Castilian bishops who seem to have been unduly influenced to swear to a story that Pedro and Maria were secretly married prior to his legal marriage to Blanche of Bourbon, making Pedro an admitted bigamist whose ex post facto explanation sounds suspicious at best.  Thus, Constance herself grew up with some degree of uncertainty -- she had to have been aware that her father was not legally married to her mother and had seen her own father severely abandon and imprison his young wife because he desired the attentions of another.  Do we perhaps see this in her seeming acceptance of John of Gaunt's affair with Katherine Swynford?  Constance's mother as she knew her was the faithful and feted mistress, but to a man willing to commit bigamy (and worse) and to shut his legal wife away under inaccessible and incommunicable guard.

Disgusted or disheartened by her long life in Castile, Maria participated in a 1354 rebellion against Pedro and left Castile once again, never to return in life.  She was buried with two small children.  Constance probably never knew her paternal grandmother but was likely later told the Castilian version of events; this we may safely assume given Armitage-Smith's argument that Constance was later a valued Iberian font of knowledge for John of Gaunt.

Unlike Maria of Portugal, Blanche of Bourbon had but little support from Pope or family, enabling Pedro to desert after a mere three days of their 1353 wedding to return to the arms of his mistress Maria de Padilla.  While Pedro was legally married to Blanche of Bourbon, Maria bore Pedro four almost certainly illegitimate children who grew up to watch their father irritate a number of his country's noblemen including his own half-siblings, and watch this turn murderous, their mother never accorded international recognition of the legality of her 'union' and the murder of their father at the hands of his illegitimate half-brother and his supporters.

What happened there???

The Will and Burial of John of Gaunt, 1399

I, John, son of the King of England, Duke of Lancaster, February 3d, 1397. My body to be buried in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, of London, near the principal altar, beside my most dear late wife Blanch, who is there interred. If I die out of London I desire that the night my body arrives there, that it be carried direct to the Friars Carmelites in Fleet Street, and the next day taken strait to St. Paul's, and that it be not buried for forty days, during which I charge my executors that there be no cering or embalming my corpse...

Seal of John of Gaunt, seated, crowned and with royal scepter
and orb.

John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Aquitaine and Guyenne; fourth son of England's Edward III and his lowlands queen, Philippa of Hainaut.  Husband to cousin Blanche of Lancaster, the sometime Infanta of Castile, Constanza, and finally to his longtime mistress, Katherine Roet Swynford.  His progeny would rule considerable areas of northern Europe during the succeeding generations, to wit:

•Henry of Lancaster (of Derby or Monmouth), son of Gaunt by his first wife, who took the throne by right of conquest from his first cousin Richard II;

•Philippa of Lancaster, his daughter by Blanche of Lancaster, who became Queen of Portugal upon her marriage to Joao I of Portugal, cementing the world's longest standing naval treaty, still in force today;

•Catherine of Lancaster, his daughter by the Infanta Constanza, who became Queen of Spain upon her marriage to Enrique III (Trastamara);

•John Beaufort, son by his mistress Katherine, who was raised to the rank of Marquis and was a staunch supporter of the House of Lancaster; his direct line ended in a female -- Margaret Beaufort -- who was, of course, the mother of Henry VII.

•Thomas Beaufort, a capable admiral and loyal supporter of his half-brother, Henry IV, who was noted for his high moral standards.

•Joan Beaufort, his daughter with Katherine Swynford, who made an extremely advantageous second marriage upon legitimation to the Earl of Westmoreland, Ralph Neville.  Their children's lines would be largely decimated in the subsequent Wars of the Roses as their lines split between Lancastrian (as seen on Joan's empty tomb effigy at Staindrop Church and in MS illuminations) and those of Yorkist affiliations (especially descending from Joan's daughter Cecily Neville, the white rose of Raby).

•Henry Beaufort, Bishop, Cardinal and Chancellor of England, son of John and Katherine who has been described as the ablest of the Beauforts. Beaufort's financial astuteness resulted in a well feathered nest for him and those he cared for, including his half-brother the King and his nephew, Henry V.  Beaufort financed to a large degree English military exploits during his adulthood, and was largely responsible, along with his sister Joan, for establishing the Lincoln Cathedral tombs and chantry for Joan and their mother, Katherine.  He was also a seasoned diplomat, meeting with the Hess, and even making a joke about Sweden's St. Birgitta during diplomatic negotiations.

John's personal seal showing the arms of England & France, ancient.

Gaunt's Will. 

Wills are wonderful tools to examine to see what was considered valuable or meaningful or important.  Some are short and perfunctory, some are very legalistic, and others shine light upon the deceased and the people in his or her life.  The will of John of Gaunt is detailed and complex but also gives ample evidence of those who were important in his life as well as some practical matters, as we shall see below.

Probably the most curious aspect of Gaunt's will -- and it was up front in the second sentence of the will -- was the business of the deceased being kept above ground for a considerable period, without benefit of embalming or preservation of the body; in Gaunt's case, the term was for 40 days.  The request seems strange and morbid until one realizes that, in the absence of knowledge gained from modern medicine, someone suffering from some hopefully temporary condition that makes one appear as dead (comatose? catatonic? a stroke?) just might have a vested interest in not being summarily buried alive.  The fear of being buried alive is said to be one of the more common human phobias.  The philosopher John Duns Scotus was reportedly buried alive (although the 14th century tale is likely apocryphal).  Other stories were known, as well:  it seems to have been used for executions in medieval Italy and Japan.  Why would Gaunt have had this fear?

Not all wills carried this provision and one wonders what was on Gaunt's mind.  Biographer Anthony Goodman discusses at some length the various political entanglements afoot towards the end of Gaunt's days:  longstanding conflicts within the royal family were coming to a head, pitting  brother against brother; the proposed marriage and peace treaty with France was one such source of contention.   Gaunt's brother Woodstock was reported to have betrayed their plan to kidnap the king, Gaunt, and brother Langley to remove them from power.  John Beaufort and Henry of Derby were both involved and things got ugly, culminating in Richard's having Woodstock assassinated.  Gaunt evidently had begun to fear Richard with respect to the royal family and his own close kin; as he left Richard's presence a few years earlier to manage crown affairs, he wrote to the king,

I believe and truly hope, my lord, that you have always had such proof [of my loyalty] by experience of all my dealings with you.

Richard was playing a tricky game of appeasement with his uncle.  On the one hand, he was invariably courteous and outwardly supportive: he acceded to Gaunt's wish to have his cherished Beaufort children legitimated.  Richard, who was contemplating his second marriage to Isabella of Valois, was likely not feeling particularly competitive where his Beaufort relations were concerned.  On the other, Gaunt may have lived every day wondering when the assassin -- possibly armed with disabling poison or other substance -- would come for him.  He'd been fighting for the crown of Castile for his wife, and the Castilian court was byzantine at best.  He'd lost his loved palace of the Savoy.  So many vicissitudes may have weighed on his mind as he drew up his will preparatory to breathing his last.  What would happen now to his wife and their four children?

Links:

Buried Alive!
Medieval Persian teenager declared 'dead'

3 February 1399: Death of John of Gaunt

John of Gaunt; a 16th C. Portrait by Corneliz.  Gaunt's heraldic tunic, seen in
the full original,  shows his adoption of the arms of Spain in right of his wife.

Shortly after the New Year, John, called 'of Gaunt' for his birthplace in Ghent, Belgium, son of England's King Edward III and Queen Philippa 'of Hainaut,' acknowledged the ending of his mortal existence and died at Leicester Castle.  He was 58 years old.

He had been ill for months, since at least the prior September when, after his son's unexpected banishment, he had perhaps become weary of his life.  Henry of Derby had thought to go on pilgrimage but held back after reports that his father wasn't likely to live long.

The man described as the last knight never wore a crown of his own but his son and daughters were kings or queens of England, Spain and Portugal.

One happy life achievement happened when he married his longtime mistress, Katherine Swynford, and obtained papal and parliamentary legitimation of their four adult children, the Beauforts, in 1396.  The Duchess Constanza, living largely apart from Gaunt, died in 1394 while Gaunt was abroad and was buried with fitting pomp in the medieval Collegiate Church of Leicester, also the burial place for Gaunt's daughter-in-law, Mary de Bohun, who died within the same year.  The church, no longer extant, had just been established as a Lancastrian favorite by Blanche of Lancaster's father.

Digitally reconstructed interior of the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was the royal chantry chapel of the Dukes of Lancaster in the the Chantry College of the Annunciation of St Mary in the Newarke, Leicester, founded in 1353. (text and information here.

Richard II also lost his wife, Anne of Bohemia, in that year and his grief was well known and may have been a turning point in the development of his personality as well as his relationships with others.

Lilleshall Abbey Lodge

At the close of the year, John of Gaunt, his wife Katherine and squire William Chetwynd, lodged for two evenings at Lilleshall Abbey (January 1398) when Gaunt fell ill with fever following the close of the Shrewsbury Parliament.

Little exists now of the abbey but Gaunt's lodging there, following that of his nephew Richard II, his queen Isabella of Valois, five dukes and three earls there at the beginning of the 24th Parliament doubtless helped revive the abbey from poor financial management.  Gaunt's retinue alone was likely to have been considerable (his visit was recorded as cum familia copius nimis), and his gift to the abbey of  twenty pounds of gold as well as the abbey's admission of John and Duchess Katherine to the abbey's confraternity led to newfound influence of the abbey and in Lancastrian knights' financial support.

Lilleshall Abbey West Front Carving.  Splendid ruins remain of the sandstone building.

The buildings on the east and south sides of the cloister, which lay south of the church, were completed in stone in the late 12th century.... The range contained an outer parlour next to the church, the abbot's or guest hall on the first floor, and the abbot's lodging in a projecting wing near the south end. The first-floor hall may have been a rebuilding of an earlier one, mentioned c. 1272... in the same position. In the early 19th century it was recorded that the hall measured 66 feet by 28 feet; it had a number of small rooms below and a staircase leading to an upper story. Many floor-tiles, some with armorial bearings, were being carried away at that time. Foundations of buildings have been uncovered in the outer court to the south of the cloister but, pending scientific excavation, their function remains unknown. The position of the infirmary has not yet been established and the guest accommodation of the abbey was clearly on a scale that could house, albeit with some difficulty, the huge retinue of John of Gaunt. Traces of the precinct wall have been discovered, but the exact location of the great gate is not known (Source).

G. Vertue; 18th C. Engraving.

From the Shrewsbury Parliament to Lilleshall Abbey, John, Katherine and his retinue continued south to Leceister Castle, where he settled in, signed his will, and passed away after receiving a visit from the King.  Richard's demeanor towards his uncle appears to have changed considerably by the end of Gaunt's life: always outwardly courteous but with a glint of sharp, hardened metal behind his gaze.  It has been widely speculated that Richard's reception of him when he returned from abroad in 1395 while correct, was not cordial, and one naturally ponders Richard's advancing the Beauforts while settling his gaze on their half-brother as *the* threat to his reign.

After extending the banishment of Gaunt's son Henry of Derby from 6 years to life and the confiscation of his inheritance, Richard apparently had one last score to settle with his uncle:  he is said to have met with Gaunt, leaving him with a set of documents.  We will likely never know the contents of those documents, but it is said that Gaunt expired shortly after they were read to him.  All that was left was the execution of his will and his burial next to his first wife in old St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

Wenceslas Hollar engraving of the alabaster double tomb of John of Lancaster
and his wife, Blanche, in St. Paul's.  It was completed in the 1380s.

Links:

Armitage-Smith Biography of Gaunt Online

Lilleshall Abbey History

Images of Lilleshall

Historic England: Lilleshall

Collegiate Church of Newark, Leicester

The Royal Christmas of 1377

On the Sunday before Candlemas's, in the night, one hundred and thirty citizens, disguised and well horsed, in a mummery, with sound of trumpets, sackbuts, cornets, shames and other minstrels and innumerable torch lights of wax, rode from Newgate, through, Cheape, over the bridge... and so to Kennington Lambhith, where the young prince remained with his mother and the Duke of Lancaster

Medieval mummers, disguised wearing animal heads and stag's antlers.

The royal Christmas celebrations of 1377 have been thought to be quite the gold standard in holiday affairs by those who study medieval English Christmas celebrations. Doubtless planned by Gaunt in the first year of his nephew's minority, they rivaled those of the previous year at Windsor in which Gaunt's father, Edward III, presented his grandson Richard of Bordeaux as his intended heir. Festivities and feasting were reportedly provided for more than 10,000 people, requiring the slaughter and preparation of 28 oxen and 300 sheep.

The good citizens of London seemed to have temporarily put aside their political differences with Gaunt and provided mummers, games & gifts for the entertainment of the boy-king and his entourage, which included the royal courts of his mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales Joan of Kent, and that of his powerful uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, at Kennington Palace.

In the first rank did ride forty-eight in the likeness and habit of esquires, two and two together, clothed in red coats and gowns of say or sandal, with comely visors on their faces; after them came riding forty-eight knights in the same livery of colour and stuff; then followed one richly arrayed like an emperor; and after him some distance, one stately attired like a pope, whom followed twenty-four cardinals, and after then eight or ten with black visors, not amiable, as if they had been legates from some foreign princes...

Kennington Palace was no courtly backwater; earlier that year, when Gaunt was experiencing some difficulties and personal affronts from the Londoners, he was thought to be at his famous Palace of the Savoy where an unruly mob sought him as well as Henry Percy, Marshall of England. Gaunt and Percy instead happened to be dining with John of Ypres at his Inn and, when alerted of the mob, hastily departed by barge to Kennington where the Princess of Wales and her son Richard of Bordeaux were residing and were given shelter.  Joan of Kent's residence was thus doubtless a luxuriously confortable, if not entirely defensible, palace and an altogether appropriate place to celebrate the first Christes' Mass of the boy-king Richard II. It was a place in which, as we've seen above, was a good place in which to spend the celebratory days of Christmas rife with feasting, gaming and pageantry.  Unfortunately, history has seemingly erased all trace of the medieval palace and the image below cannot be dated to earlier than its presumed 1531 destruction under Henry VIII:


One reason for Christmas feasting and merriment was that it followed Advent, a period during which no animal products were to be consumed, with the exception of fish (which one simply did NOT serve during Christmas as people were sick of it and the host thought the more poorly for it serving), goose (as long as one claimed in good conscience that it was the mythical barnacle goose) and tail of beaver (it was declared sufficiently fish-like as it lived in the water). The hours of daylight were shorter and the cold could be bitterly so. The feasts on Christmas day, however, served to mitigate some measure of all that. Eggs, cheese, milk and meats could be eaten (the boar's head presentation was fairly common throughout the land and even in those areas where there were no boars to eat, it was still traditional to serve up some foodstuff resembling a boar's head). Goose, ox, all manner of other birds, pigs and venison were artfully served at the aristocrat's table, basted and baked with butter and saffron to give a golden hue.

The royal even ate swan (The Carmina Burana songs written from a set of 13^th century German poems, even contain a humorous entry Cignus ustus cantat about a swan being cooked for dinner which ends somewhat amusingly if ominously with the line, dentes frendentes video). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWlliPwgUok&list=RDaWlliPwgUok&start_radio=1

Frumenty, a fruited and spiced grain pottage, was also popular as was mincemeat (actual minced meat with spices) and, well, anything you could do with the meat you could procure. 

For the period between here and Lent people found reason to come together in food, wine or ale, the warmth of the pagan Yule log, games and the singing of songs that the church at the time was not particularly fond of (one can almost see why they would not be enthralled by the idea of drunken revelers singing non-liturgical songs in their hallowed grounds). Collectively, these would be the precursors to the caroling tradition – the joyful, sometimes dancing, probably always inebriated singing of non-liturgical songs or “carols,” some of which we may continue to hear in some fashion today.

Also doubtless present at the Kennington celebrations' cosy if prominent royal family affair were Gaunt's family, including his Duchess, Constance, and their daughter Catherine/Catalina; his son and heir Henry; his daughters Philippa and Elizabeth, as well as their governess, Katherine Swynford, and her then-three children by Gaunt, John, Thomas and either Henry or Joan Beaufort, all of whom would have been young children of the approximate age of 5 or less. Also likely present was Katherine's sister, Philippa Chaucer, who had joined the court of Gaunt's Duchess Constance in 1372 (her husband, Geoffrey Chaucer, however, was away this Christmas on the King's diplomatic business) and who had on occasion received from Gaunt luxury items like a silver 'bottler' and a number of buttons. 

Though Gaunt had had his problems with the Londoners and their disapproval of his handling the affairs of his father in his dotage and now his nephew in his minority, 1377 had been a good year for Katherine. Earlier that March she had received confirmation of Gaunt's grant to her of the Nottinghamshire manors of Gringly and Whetly, the resources from which may have been used for her improvement programme at Kettlethorpe, where she may have sometimes retreated in times of advanced pregnancy (we know, for example, that Gaunt ordered wine to be immediately delivered to her there in 1379 I believe, and some of his financial registry entries are dated from Kettlethorpe). Katherine was secure in her position, both as governess to Gaunt's daughters as well as his recognized mistress and preferred female companion. Indeed, these were heady years for her prior to the tumult of the 1381 Peasant's Revolt and the uncertainty it would bring to her position at court. But in 1377, at Christmas, she likely enjoyed family, the mummeries, games, and smells and sights, good food and the happiness and security of her life near the very center of the court of the country's largest land owner and richest magnate and his guys, the young boy-king Richard II and his mother, the widowed Joan of Kent, Princess of Wales.

These masters, after they had entered Kenington, alighted from their horses, and entered the hall on foot; which done, the prince, his mother, and the lords, came out of the chambers into the hall, whom the said mummers did salute, showing by a pair of dice upon the table their desire to play with the prince, which they so handled that the prince did always win when he cast them.
Then the mummers set to the prince three jewels, one after another, which were a bowl of gold, a cup of gold, and a ring of gold, which the prince won at three casts. Then they set to the prince's mother, the duke the earls, and other lords, to every one a ring of gold, which they did also win...

Medieval MS illumination of gaming with dice; see
http://www.larsdatter.com/games-dice.htm for more information.

The playing of various games was another important feature of medieval Christmas festivities. The 1377 accounts clearly reference various dice-based games of chance that somehow always ended in the doubtless delighted nine-year-old Richard II winning. These pre-Christian activities were to be repeatedly denounced by the church and yet repeatedly ignored by the populace for a few hundred years. Participants would bet upon the outcome of the dice thrown, usually two or three, as in the image above.  John of Gaunt had a distinct fondness of high quality luxury goods, one of which was likely the famous "Duchess of Lancaster" ring of intricately-worked solid gold with a prong-set natural blue sapphire, which recently sold at auction for nearly US$70,000.

14th C. Duchess of Lancaster gold ring with sapphire and
the blackletter engraving on the inside reading 'Alas but for fate.'

Also popular quite possibly were the card games which may have come to England by 1377 via the Castilian companions of the Duchess Constance, who themselves likely acquired the carding habit from Spain's Moorish population. The church wasn't fond of these games, either. A card game named “naibbe” was forbidden by decree in Florence by May, 1376 and another card game preached against in Switzerland by a Dominican friar in Basle in 1377. But merriment was the order of the day and likely all such games that were known to the English at the time were played that season at Kennington.

After which they feasted, and the music sounded, and prince and lords danced on the one part with the mummers, which did also dance; which jollity being ended, they were again made to drink, and then departed in order as they came.

Unlike today, in which Christmas is a single day of celebration (two at most if you consider Christmas Eve), Christmas in the high middle ages for the wealthy was an extravagant series of events lasting for several weeks from Christmas through 12^th Night, through New Year and to Candlemass in early February. According to John of Gaunt's extant printed financial Registers and other sources, the family exchanged the more extravagant gifts on New Year's rather than on Christmas, as it was the more celebratory holiday in terms of gift-giving.

John of Gaunt was particularly magnanimous in his New Year's gifts. We know, for example, from his 1373 financial accounts, that he spent a fair amount of money on gifts to his household and that he purchased his luxury goods from the finest London guild of goldsmiths, comprising of  divers silver-gilt hannaps and divers gold beads [paternosters] and gold brooches and rings and phials and other jewels bought from them for us and given away on New Year's Day at Eltham last year.   Indeed, in this Christmas celebration, as stated previously, Gaunt had provided a gift for Philippa Chaucer, of his wife's court, of a “botoner” and six silver-gilt buttons; he later in 1381 and 1382 gave her gifts of a covered silver hanap and two additional silver hanaps.

Gaunt purchased his luxury gift items from only the best; his favorite seems to have been the Nicholas Twyford noted in his financial accounts as well as London record. Nicholas Twyford was most fortunate in securing the favor of both John of Gaunt as well as the young Richard II. Twyford was a member of the London Company of Goldsmiths (a guild), recognized as early as 1327 and having a membership of 135 by 1368. Twyford himself would become Mayor of London in 1388 having no doubt distinguished himself in 1377 for the coronation of the boy-king: 

 “When the royal procession reached Cheapside where the shops of the goldsmiths were concentrated, beautiful young ladies showered the ten-year-old monarch with leaves of gold and presented him with gold cups full of fine wine. A golden angel descended with a golden crown, which was offered to Richard as he rode past."  

The king must have been well pleased with the spectacle, as well as the guild's generosity, because the entire pageant was restaged as part of his 1392 royal entry into London.  John of Gaunt would continue to utilize Twyford's services for a decade or more to come.

Ahh, and then, there was the food itself. Richard II is notable for many things, including increasing the numbers of women and their roles in the Order of the Garter (Katherine herself would be inducted in 1386/7), and his artistic as well as his culinary interests. The “Forme of Curye,” ca. 1390, is a collection of his court's recipes and provides an interesting insight into what may have been consumed on that Christmas period of 1377 inasmuch as it is a collection of what was likely Richard's favorites. It contains 196 recipes, many of which would appear strange to the modern eye.

Fish, of course, was entirely out of the question. People were likely sick of eating nothing but fish and little else during Advent. Cooking with (mostly imported) spices heightened the dining activity, and known to have been in use are cinnamon, mace, cloves, ginger, pepper, cardamom and nutmeg.¹⁷ Honey was likewise more prevalent in use then 'white sugar' as a sweetener, and it was sometimes clarified by boiling it with egg whites. Every manner of bird and flesh animal (any bird that could be caught, deer, rabbits, hens, pigs, cows, boars), when provisioned, would be served, often in sauces that might make some of us wince. Almond milk was used rather a lot, as was wine. Sweets, too, such as marchpane, would be served in curiously devised forms meant to delight the person eating them. For the wealthy, dishes as well as goblets for wine, both domestic as well as imported, would be provided, and the evening would end with people singing, dancing, drinking and, eventually, sleeping.

Christmas in later medieval England for the non-noble classes, however, was a somewhat different affair. Certainly, the period was celebrated albeit in a less luxuriant manner. The period would be amongst the last feasting days sanctified by the Church, itself perhaps a grudging admission that there simply wasn't much celebratory foodstuffs available to the non-noble class in winter. In an age of no refrigeration and few preservatives, village laborers – who may have received time off from work – could perhaps expect to share a hen with another; maybe a whole hen if he or she were really fortunate. Such persons were welcomed to the local manor, such as Kettlethorpe, where such a feast would be prepared, together with the lighting of a Yule log, and Katherine would have presided over the festivities at the head table as Lady of Kettlethorpe. Each villager would have been expected to provide his own plate/trencher or use the supplied bread as a plate to be scooped out and filled with meats and other savory fare; each was also to supply his or her own firewood lest s/he receive insufficiently cooked meat as well as a tankard or other cup. (And, if you wished for a napkin, you were on your own, although if you brought one, you were sometimes allowed to carry away any excess food that would fit.) Each was also to be provided with continued ale or alcohol (some of which ironically could be purchased at the larger churchyards) and sometimes a bed in which to sleep. It was good, celebratory, hearty fare, and Katherine's Kettlethorpe residents no doubt appreciated every minute of the days of feasting. However, it was nothing like the 300 sheep slaughtered for Gaunt's spectacular celebration for 10,000 Londoners at Kennington.

Reading Materials:
https://murreyandblue.wordpress.com/2018/07/01/the-royal-palace-at-kennington/
http://www.godecookery.com/how2cook/howto06.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8102/pg8102.html
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